FTC Shuts Down Calif. ISP For Botnets, Child Porn 224
An anonymous reader writes "The Federal Trade Commission has convinced a federal judge to pull the plug on a 3FN.net, a.k.a. 'Pricewert LLC,' a Northern California based hosting provider. The FTC alleges that 3FN/Pricewert was directly involved in setting up spam-spewing botnets, among other illegal activities, the Washington Post's Security Fix Blog writes. From the story: 'Pricewert hosts very little legitimate content and vast quantities of illegal, malicious, and harmful content, including child pornography, botnet command and control servers, spyware, viruses, trojans, phishing related sites, illegal online pharmacies, investment and other Web-based scams, and pornography featuring violence, bestiality, and incest.' The story quotes a former Justice Dept. expert saying the FTC action may be a smoke screen for a larger criminal investigation by the federal government in 3FN's activities."
Hand It Over to Someone More Capable (Score:5, Insightful)
Christopher Barton, lead research scientist at McAfee, said a number of 3FN domain name servers already have popped up at new locations online.
"The rats are running," Barton said.
Oh, that's a shame, maybe next time we should hand this matter over to the USAF or at least the FBI. You know, someone capable of exterminating or prosecuting the 'rats'?
Leibowitz said his agency would continue to pursue other ISPs that "provide a haven for Internet criminals."
"This is a signal that we're going to go after you, and you're not going to be able to hide behind the shroud of the Internet and be immune from enforcement action," Leibowitz said.
A signed copy of the FTC's complaint is available here (PDF).
Ahahah, is that a joke?
FTC Chairman Leibowitz: Let this very strongly worded complaint be a clear message to those that escaped yet again! We will not falter until we have lodged very strongly worded complaints against each and every one of you at least four times!
Botnet Leader: Jesus Christ, I think I just shit myself! My god, you just shut down one of like 50 ISPs we use! We might even have to go to another country to run our lucrative operations! Oh the horror of operating out of the Cayman Islands! Laying on the beach, raking in cash! Will you show us no mercy?!
So tell me, when will all the court cases be launched from the data you collected from the servers you confiscated in this coup de grace? They were operating out of Northern California, surely you contacted the appropriate law enforcement agencies, gathered a massive stack of warrants and cunningly orchestrated a perfect storming of all facilities to capture servers with juicy financial, IP, personal and foreign data? And then surely you froze the assets in these accounts and entered all this as evidence in a mounting trial against business and individuals foreign and domestic? Oh you didn't? Oh, you just warned their ISPs and strutted around waving a complaint and acting like you saved the day? Well done.
Re:OT: Which browser is slashdot supposed to work (Score:3, Insightful)
I can tell you for sure, it sure as hell isn't Firefox. I'm about to give up, and my karma rating has been 'Excellent' ages.
Re:OT: Which browser is slashdot supposed to work (Score:4, Insightful)
Looks like the Slashdot clowns are "targeting" all browsers. Everything sucks.
Their Web 2.0 hard-on must be draining the blood from their brains. Slashdot is now slow, bloated, and fucked up.
Just try getting that asinine slide-bar to show ALL posts. No can do, because the script kiddies coding it up are too stupid to handle boundary conditions properly.
Re:OT: Which browser is slashdot supposed to work (Score:3, Insightful)
Slashdot doesn't work in any browser.
Also, they have a policy of launching new, untested, broken features mid week during peak usage.
In addition, they have a policy of "belittle and close" when you submit a bug to sourceforge.
Re:Hand It Over to Someone More Capable (Score:5, Insightful)
Oh, that's a shame, maybe next time we should hand this matter over to the USAF or at least the FBI. You know, someone capable of exterminating or prosecuting the 'rats'?
And this is what I was thinking. I'm very confused, but I'm also not an American. What does the Federal Trade Commission have to do with acting on illegal material such as the crazy stuff suggested by the article? Where are the criminal charges here?
Or is this a bit like the Environmental Protection Agency investigating a murder because... they feel like it....
Re:Quite a list (Score:3, Insightful)
But what makes it different than any other ISP?
You mean other than this quote from the second sentence?
The FTC alleges that 3FN/Pricewert was directly involved in setting up spam-spewing botnets, among other illegal activities
I'm pretty sure Verizon, Time Warner, AT&T, Comcast, Cablevision, Cox, Suddenlink, just to name a few ISPs, aren't directly involved in any illegal activities on their network.
"including child pornography..." (Score:5, Insightful)
Anytime I see something referencing child pornography, I immediately think it's a smear campaign.
I don't know anything about 3FN.net, but generally...
ISPs don't host porn, they host websites. Some people put up websites that have porn or other content that someone might object to. Some websites have illegal content.
Sometimes people get frustrated because it's difficult to stop whatever activity it is they are trying to stop. Because an ISP provides its customers with anonymity, or because it doesn't log certain things, or because they are not cooperative with whatever branch of the government wants their cooperation does not make them bad. There are plenty of legitimate, good, positive-for-society reasons that anonymity or partial anonymity is necessary. There are ways of enforcing the law and bettering society that don't strip rights away from free people doing ordinary things.
Re:OT: Which browser is slashdot supposed to work (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm using browsers that get 100/100 on Acid3 and those don't have trouble.
Re:What the article leaves out (Score:1, Insightful)
I'm lost... why is "bestiality" in the list of bad things? They have the donkey joke in the American Pie movies and its always behind the curtain, so I looked it up... does that mean I'm going to jail?
Re:Hand It Over to Someone More Capable (Score:5, Insightful)
and pornography featuring violence, bestiality, and incest
illegal? I know they mentioned other things that are, but throwing things that many people are opposed to in with things that are actually illegal is a slippery slope towards censorship. Just think of the children..
legitimate content (Score:2, Insightful)
What about the "legitimate content" owners? If I was running a business, which provided my family income (6 dependents), and supported a customer base with services, the FTC just killed it without warning or justification.
You don't shut down a phone company (e.g. AT&T or Sprint) if someone is commiting crimes using a phone. If a local phone company or branch telephone office is "directly involved", again, the FTC does -NOT- kill phone service to the customers and businesses in the area.
"Sometime on Tuesday, more than 15,000 Web sites connected to San Jose, Calif., based Triple Fiber Network (3FN.net) went dark." How many thousands of those sites were legitimate businesses or customers who have been seriously hurt by the FTC exceeding its authority and requesting that upstream providers breach their contracts with 3FN.net. When one of these businesses goes under, or the soldier in Korea can't get the streaming video of his childs' birthday party, who do they call? The FTC?
The government is proud of itself for not doing its job. Actually prosecuting the criminals. If there haven't been any crimes, they had no right. If there have been crimes, they have a responsibility to prosecute. Either way, this action was both wrong and irresponsible.
Re:Hand It Over to Someone More Capable (Score:3, Insightful)
I agree. And I saw this happen in the UK [backlash-uk.org.uk]. According to my Government, "violent" acts between consenting adults, even if simulated, are just as bad as child pornography. Many police forces submitted evidence to the Government consultation [seenoevil.org.uk] saying that people who start out looking at such material will end up abusing children.
Re:It's about gathering evidence. (Score:3, Insightful)
By far the most important part of this incident "Northern California district court judge approved an FTC request to have the company's upstream Internet providers stop routing traffic for the provider". So no matter to which country they shift their criminal operations that action can still be applied locally to block traffic from a illegal enterprise masquerading behind the façade of a legal ISP, where there is sufficient evidence of the direct involvement in criminal enterprise.
The only tricky part is, should all legitimate customers be warned of this action prior to it occurring so that they can relocate their services because the legal action is also attacking innocent third parties and disrupting their services and that is no really appropriate.
Re:Holy FUD Campaign Batman! (Score:3, Insightful)
Unless it involves homosexual identical twins, how can you even know it is incestuous anyway?
Sure, someone can say it is incest, but that's just wish fullfillment on the part of law enforcement.
Re:It's about gathering evidence. (Score:1, Insightful)
This guy has a license to operate
In the United States no license is required to be an ISP.
He may or may not have a "business license", but that's merely about locating the facility in an appropriately zoned location.
He isn't using chemicals or industrial machinery or anything like that, and the Internet is not regulated. (Newspapers in this country don't require licensing, either.)
It's not clear at all what the FTC has to do with this, unless they are claiming that the ISP is somehow not protected by the common-carrier-like provisions. It's a very peculiar thing for the FTC, rather than other agencies like the FBI or maybe even the FCC to be equally involved here. Much as they seem to be the scum of the earth, there's no legal basis for shutting them down at all, unless there is an accusation of some kind of criminal conspiracy.
Do you trust the FTC? (Score:3, Insightful)
"from the child-porn-world-needs-more-suicides dept."
Several people who I know have been victims of child porn laws, despite not having paid for or traded anything and having therefore not encouraged or facilitated production. Rather than making assumptions about child pornography, you may consider researching [newgon.com] the issue. You should also remember that visiting websites which are alleged to contain illegal images - without loading the images (by disabling images in the browser) - is not illegal and can provide significant insight into the issue.
I'd also suggest a critical consideration of the FTC's statements. The war on child pornography is often used as a cover for wars on slightly more popular content which happens to offend the state. I find it rather bizarre that so many people who are critical of the state tend to believe whatever the state and its subsidiaries says about child porn.